Open access

Open access (OA) refers to the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly research. Open access comes in two degrees: Gratis open access, which is free access, and Libre open access, which is free access plus some additional usage rights. These additional usage rights are often granted through the use of various specific Creative Commons licenses. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, and monographs.

History

The open access movement began in the 1990s, as part of a wider movement for academic freedom and access to knowledge. The term itself was first coined in 2001 at the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which defined open access as follows:

"By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this context, is the authors' control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."'

Types of open access

There are two main types of open access: Green open access, also known as self-archiving, where the author deposits their work in a repository where it can be accessed for free; and Gold open access, where the work is published in an open access journal and is immediately freely available.

Benefits and criticisms

Open access has been praised for its potential to democratize knowledge and make academic research more widely available. However, it has also been criticized for potentially undermining the quality of scholarly publishing and for its implications for the financial sustainability of academic journals.

See also

• Academic publishing
• Open educational resources
• Open data
• Open science
• Open source
• Open content

References

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